Friendship, Week 2: Syzygy (2/2)
Title: Syzygy
Author: naye
Prompt: Weather or elements
Rating: PG
Word Count: 15,000
Warnings/Spoilers: Set in early season three, after Misbegotten
Summary: Rodney, Ronon, and a day that begins with a land tsunami, and goes downhill from there.
( Syzygy, part two )
Author: naye
Prompt: Weather or elements
Rating: PG
Word Count: 15,000
Warnings/Spoilers: Set in early season three, after Misbegotten
Summary: Rodney, Ronon, and a day that begins with a land tsunami, and goes downhill from there.
( Syzygy, part two )
Somehow it shouldn't surprise me to discover some brain-sharing along those lines. *g*
This is something I've been thinking about for awhile, and especially in Stargate fandom, where it's awfully common for writers to introduce random superstitious spear-throwing natives as plot devices. (Which, uh. I actually did in "Candle in the Dark", literally. And felt really guilty about it!) Anyway, I haven't really been able to figure out how to frame such a discussion without singling out individual writers' work, which I don't want to do, but it is something I wish the fandom would be a little more aware of. Not that it's necessary for every story to be a nuanced picture of international relations -- I realize that sometimes you're just going to want baddies to beat the crap out of the good guys and throw them in a pit as a prelude to the rest of the story -- but it is something I wish the fandom was a little more aware of.
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And I think you can discuss it without naming specific stories, because there are general trends in fandom - but I can see why you wouldn't want anyone to feel it was a discussion targeted at them. But since we're here, in my fic, I'm just going to ramble on. *g*
So, the two issues, as I see it - first, the moral. It doesn't matter if you're writing Gateverse or a generic cop show or what. As soon as you introduce a human bad guy who does the actual hurting, you have a situation that needs to be resolved. Obviously, the good guys need to be rescued, but the bad guy also needs to be punished. It's possible to have an escape, and then the bad guy(s) get away scot free, but - it's not really satisfying, is it? Dramatically, you can make a simple rescue work, but there's also an underlying need for justice/retribution, for a story to feel really complete.
And "justice" can be very... subjective? Yeah, shooting the bad guy dead works, but... then you've got the good guys killing people. Which they do a lot of in canon, I know. But. It's not always that easy. Or - if it is that easy, that means the whole scenario is very black and white, and... Hmm. It's rarely that simple? If someone's hurting the good guys in some way, it could be that they are just sadistic creeps, but - how often does that happen? And now we start crossing over to the whole "natives" issue, because - why should an entire people/culture want to hurt our guys? Giving them an arbitrary reason that makes no sense to the reader would make the natives seem barbaric and possibly downright sadistic and stupid. But give them a good reason, and all of a sudden it doesn't seem that obvious that the good guys should kill them all.
To use an example I think worked really well - xparrot wrote a One Piece fic called "Bound and Determined", where the torturer was a hired goon. He enjoyed his work, obviously, but he wasn't the one calling the shots. In the end, he got trapped in a falling building, by a charge I think he'd set off himself? I thought that was a really neat solution - the bad guy gets punished, but our heroes don't go dark side for revenge. Also, there was a logical motive to the torturer's actions - he was getting paid. It was just a job. (Which is a very interesting kind of evil in its own right.)
As for the "spear-throwing natives"... yeah, they're useful plot devices. I see them all the time. I haven't wanted to use them, because - okay, Wraith worshipers. They're canon. But it does bother me when they're presented as mindless servants of the Wraith, brandishing their primitive weapons and betraying and/or hunting the team for no reason except that they're "natives" or "Wraith worshipers".
That's one thing the show itself does pretty well - I don't think they've used random spear-throwing natives in anything! The actual Wraith worshipers have been very, very few, and those were of the very sneaky kind. No spear-throwing! In "Sateda" the people who captured Ronon were really cool because they were not Wraith worshipers - they were just desperate to survive, and blinded by grief and rage that they couldn't possibly take out on the Wraith themselves. Their deaths felt sad, not justified - Ronon was willing to give his life for theirs, despite what they did to him. And that's the kind of enemies I feel make for the most interesting kind of stories!
All of this to say that it's a fascinating discussion, and one I really need to think more about!
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This is really something that I end up thinking about a lot, in fanfic and original fic, because I like writing action-type stuff but then, there has to be an antagonist of some kind.
Some canons, of course, have crazy/evil baddies already -- that was one thing that I don't think I appreciated at the time about writing Trigun, because the canon bad guys were so psychotic that pretty much anything I wanted to have them do was justifiable in terms of canon.
But more often, we have to make our own. (And of course, in original fic, that's the ONLY option.)
I think that bad guy motivations are really one of the biggest problems that I have, because "they're evil/crazy" is pretty flat and doesn't work that well in a real-world context. "They're deluded/operating under false beliefs" is one I use quite a bit, but it's a much more complicated one to unravel and to do justice to, especially in a shorter story. And of course, then there's the hardest one of all to pull off, but the one that's the most satisfying on a real-world level -- "They're also right", or even "They're right and the good guys are wrong", as in that "village of virgins" SGA fanfic I wrote.
Most of my longer SGA stories seem to fall into the deluded-bad-guy or tragic-misunderstanding camp. In "Killing Frost" especially, I worked hard to make the Wraith worshippers comprehensible, if not sympathetic -- I wanted to make them seem like people who were picking what they saw as the winning side in the war, not psychos; people who killed who they had to, to protect their secrets, but weren't out for wholesale slaughter.
In the end, he got trapped in a falling building, by a charge I think he'd set off himself? I thought that was a really neat solution - the bad guy gets punished, but our heroes don't go dark side for revenge. Also, there was a logical motive to the torturer's actions - he was getting paid. It was just a job. (Which is a very interesting kind of evil in its own right.)
I wish I could remember Emilie's older stories better! I vaguely remember this one, but not the details; I was only ever peripherally into One Piece fandom, and I think her stories were very nearly the only One Piece ones I read. (And, uh, did she ever finish "Tiger Hunt", anyway?)
I'm ... undecided on "the bad guy does himself in" endings; I think it depends on how it's done. Used badly, they're almost comical -- the classic example is the one that's so common in action movies and westerns, where the good guy gets him to surrender and is willing to let him live, and then the bad guy pulls out that last gun or knife or grenade and forces the good guy to kill him in self-defense. I really hate that, because it sets up a moral dilemma (what do we do with this guy?) and then forces the main character's hand, taking away the dilemma and making it black-and-white after all. And it's so overdone and predictable that you just know, the minute the good guy turns away, that the bad guy has some hidden weapon that he's about to pull out. That's why I deliberately did not do that in "Killing Frost", and had Ronon shoot the guy while he was helpless. Some readers really didn't like the fact I'd had him do that; others were equally critical of Ling for being horrified at Ronon's actions and found her horror/disgust woefully naive.
But, there are plenty of times when it does work, and allows the story to wrap up without becoming a moral quagmire. I do tend to enjoy "poetic justice" endings, where the bad guy ultimately does himself in through his own actions. In fact, I get a kind of glee from the good guys ending up as bystanders, or utterly failing in what they'd tried to do while the bad guy takes himself out. Terry Pratchett is pretty good at this. But again, you don't want to overdo it or you end up with the kind of lame ending where the good guys are rescued through no agency of their own -- and of course, that can work, especially if you're making a point about the futility/uselessness of conventional heroism (this is a recurring theme in rhymer23's stories and I really like how it's done there) but you've got to be careful with it.
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And here's another aspect in which the show - and by association we the fanfic writers - do have it pretty good: the Wraith aren't people. Even after everything that's happened, I don't think I'd bat an eyelid if the random mad scientist was a Wraith, or if those hunting the team through the forest were a bunch of Wraith drones. No matter what else we might learn about the Wraith, they're still predators more than people. They need to kill humans to live. Humans don't want to get killed, and so fight back. Simple enough.
(To digress even further I'd say that this is one point where SG-1 could get much more complex, because the whole deal with the Goa'uld was that their hosts were always unwilling - kind of like with Supernatural, and the demon-possessed people. Kill an entity like that, and you're always killing an innocent person. And "they were probably too far gone already" doesn't always make the greatest excuse, not when the main characters would do anything to rescue one of their own in that situation.)
Back to the specific examples you mentioned - you're right that shorter stories don't leave much room to explain or explore the bad guys' motivations. But it can still be difficult to buy the whole "they're just evil/crazy/sadistic" of self-motivated bad guys.
The antagonists being right in their own way, or right all the way is much more interesting! Much more complicated and possibly dark, too, but - I really liked the way you did things in "The Killing Frost". That was believable. Both the motivation to join the winning side, and the fact that these are people who have seen things they might not have been ready to handle, and that this might be their way of coping. Also, there are regular humans out there who start cults without having the benefit of being able to hold literal near-immortal beings capable of sucking the life out of you over their followers' heads. So that explored a host of interesting issues! And for all their fanaticism, they weren't mindless killing machines, which was cool.
Here is the story I was talking about - I went back to check it now that I was more awake, and realized that I'd totally misrepresented it. ^^;; My memory way way off - the good guys actually decide not to kill their torturer, but to hand him over to the authorities... They're the ones to defeat the antagonist, and when they're faced with the opportunity to kill him while he's unarmed, they just knock him out. Of course, this was written for One Piece, which makes it special - the good guys don't kill their opposition in that series. They just knock them out real good. So killing someone would have been a much greater step over into Dark Side territory than it would have been in the same kind of situation in SGA.
I'm with you on "the bad guy does himself in" endings! The only thing that's worse than the heroes having to kill bad guys in self defense (sigh, Supernatural) is when the bad guys do something that stupid and then kill themselves. Unless it's in a story aimed at children, where you don't want the good guys to be killers, I find it a total cop-out. It drove me nuts when it happened in the first Spiderman movie!
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Ha, I agree! They're very useful that way, and pretty much limitless as far as possibilities go. They're especially good for a short fic, where you don't want to spend too much time on build-up or aftermath. And, as you pointed out, allergies are another one ... and I'd add disease to that list, too. Or wild animals. Simple, amoral forces that can't be reasoned with.
And here's another aspect in which the show - and by association we the fanfic writers - do have it pretty good: the Wraith aren't people. Even after everything that's happened, I don't think I'd bat an eyelid if the random mad scientist was a Wraith, or if those hunting the team through the forest were a bunch of Wraith drones. [snip]
(To digress even further I'd say that this is one point where SG-1 could get much more complex, because the whole deal with the Goa'uld was that their hosts were always unwilling - kind of like with Supernatural, and the demon-possessed people. Kill an entity like that, and you're always killing an innocent person.
Agreed, although it's a double-edged sword -- to me, the Goa'uld are much more interesting and creepy as bad guys because of the inherent moral dilemma associated with them. However, because of those nuances, you can't use them as throwaway villains in the same manner as the Wraith can be.
I DO have a moral problem in general with the common SF/fantasy system of creating an entire race of people to be Bad Others that can be blown away without a second thought. But. Within the context of the show, the Wraith can't co-exist with human beings; it really isn't possible. They are predators, by their nature, and humans are prey -- it's a very simple dynamic and one that lends itself easily to fairly black-and-white action scenarios.
That was believable. Both the motivation to join the winning side, and the fact that these are people who have seen things they might not have been ready to handle, and that this might be their way of coping. Also, there are regular humans out there who start cults without having the benefit of being able to hold literal near-immortal beings capable of sucking the life out of you over their followers' heads.
Yay! So glad it worked! :) Yes, for Cora in particular, she just wasn't psychologically equipped for the situation she was in, and the Wraith cult (as cults do) gave her a feeling of belonging and a reason to feel good about herself. I actually felt sorry for her, especially at the end, despite the things she'd done; no matter how hard she tried to justify it, she really wasn't a killer.
Of course, this was written for One Piece, which makes it special - the good guys don't kill their opposition in that series. They just knock them out real good. So killing someone would have been a much greater step over into Dark Side territory than it would have been in the same kind of situation in SGA.
And there's a good point, too -- it matters a lot how far canon is willing to go, and how dark it gets. Not to mention the social mores of the fandom, too. I'm reminded here of my Inu-Yasha story that was pulled from ff.net for "exceeding its rating" -- it contained a torture scene which was way less graphic than a lot of similar scenes I've read in other fandoms in PG/T rated stories, but I'm guessing it was just too much for a fandom that leans heavily towards light romance, not h/c or dark/controversial material. In SGA, one thing I've really noticed is how happy most of the slash is, compared to some of the other fandoms where I've read or been exposed to slash; there is incredibly little in the way of noncon, darkfic and similar stories. I have heard of writers being flamed for writing dark or unhappy Sheppard/McKay, which I expect wouldn't happen in a fandom like, oh, Harry Potter, where both canon and fandom deal with some pretty messed-up relationships.
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Precisely! You can get so much mileage out of those kind, and never have to worry about right and wrong and retribution and motivation or anything like that. They just happen.
Agreed, although it's a double-edged sword -- to me, the Goa'uld are much more interesting and creepy as bad guys because of the inherent moral dilemma associated with them.
This is true, and I agree with you on how their ability to just possess people makes the Goa'uld infinitely more creepy than the Wraith! But having seen more SG-1 now than I had before, I have to say that for every time they use their setup for something interesting, there is a time where they totally ignore the fact that the host is an innocent human, because they just didn't have the time to deal with that extra layer.
The Wraith... They are predators, by their nature, and humans are prey -- it's a very simple dynamic and one that lends itself easily to fairly black-and-white action scenarios.
I obviously don't read a lot of SF, because I can't say I can think of any Evil Other races? Fantasy... evil entities, of course, and then we have cringe-worthy stuff like Davd Eddings's entire nations of people that are evil/corrupt/slaves to the dark god... Okay, maybe I can come up with of a few examples, now that I think about it. But the Wraith - yeah, they are predators. Which is why it was all kinds of wrong to me when they started changing that dynamic, and literally (!) made the Wraith human.
Though it all worked out, because now they have Michael, and Michael is cool. He is their monster, and that is interesting. (It's still all kinds of wrong, but it's an interesting kind of wrong!)
it matters a lot how far canon is willing to go, and how dark it gets. Not to mention the social mores of the fandom, too.
I knew about the first bit, of course, but I hadn't even thought about the second! Very interesting observation. I'm not at all as widely read as you are, but that's definitely my impression, too. That the slash is mostly happy, and when it is dark, it's more because it's a death fic, or dealing with the aftermath of something horrible happening to one of the characters - not that the characters themselves inflict the dark stuff. (Though there are naturally exceptions to this.)
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I can see why people would be very divided over something like what happened in "The Killing Frost", though. We're not used to seeing heroes make that kind of decision. Not in the genre we're all watching/writing in. (Not the genre of sci-fi, but rather the genre of PG-rated entertainment in general. As far as I know, very few episodes of SGA comes with a TV14 warning... Sateda does, I know... ) I personally liked it very much, because it was there, and it was a choice that had to be made, and Ronon made it very much in character. And there was fall-out and dealing with it, and that was good! It would have been different if they'd decided to start torturing people on-base and then killing suspected Wraith collaborators or something, but - no, for where the story was and what had happened, it added depth, not gratuitous "dark".
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I personally liked it very much, because it was there, and it was a choice that had to be made, and Ronon made it very much in character. And there was fall-out and dealing with it, and that was good!
Once again, thanks -- I really appreciate that. When I was writing it, I had a bit of an "oh crap" moment when I got to that part of the story, because I'd written myself into a situation where I felt there was only one intellectually honest way out -- only one way I *could* write it that wouldn't feel like a cop-out, which was to have Ronon shoot him. And it was in character for Ronon, too. But it's very much NOT how "good guys" are supposed to behave, and that left me conflicted over whether I'd handled it correctly, especially when some readers did express reservations about that scene. I still feel it was the right decision, though, both from a storytelling standpoint and a characterization standpoint.
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Anyway, though, I do see what you're saying, because even if you're not going for "moral quagmire", you're almost bound to end up with one at the end unless you dehumanize the bad guys (which is a quagmire of a different sort). As a number of people pointed out for the episode "Harmony", Sheppard shooting the Genii dead is ... weird, in the context of an episode that's otherwise cheerful and fluffy.
Another of my stupid writer tricks *g* for getting around that is to introduce conflict within the bad guy group -- actually, come to think of it, I use that one a lot. It does two things: it lets you get away with a lot of bad behavior on the part of one or two people on the other side if it's obvious that they're not representative of their group, and it gives you someone other than the main characters who can take them out on behalf of our guys. It's probably yet another moral cop-out, but it's one that works pretty well, I think.
That's one thing the show itself does pretty well - I don't think they've used random spear-throwing natives in anything! The actual Wraith worshipers have been very, very few, and those were of the very sneaky kind. No spear-throwing!
I hadn't really thought about this, but ... you're right! It's really ironic that the show itself deals with indigenous people more respectfully than most of fandom does. Ouch!
The one time I've done anything like that (at least that I'm aware of; I may well have unconsciously done it elsewhere and if so, I hope someone calls me on it) was in "Candle in the Dark", as mentioned earlier. Apparently, I don't feel skeevy enough about it to go back and change it, but I know it's an example of lazy writing because I knew it at the time -- I was well aware that I was using these people as a plot device and did it anyway, despite having qualms about it. I don't know if that's better or worse than having done it in ignorance...
I mean, you could fill an archive of Gateverse fic in which the characters' problems stem from the local people being superstitious, backwards, xenophobic, having inexplicably weird customs (is there a SINGLE people anywhere on Earth whose greeting rituals involve sex? c'mon!), intractible, revenge-obsessed over minor slights, stupid, naive, etc. There have been a couple of times when I've come across an example that disturbed me so deeply I felt compelled to point it out to the author, but usually, I'll let it slide, and move on to another story if it bothers me bad enough. I don't think I want people to stop -- I mean, it's fanfic, it's escapism, and I can recognize the need for that -- so much as just a better balance between fantasy and realism, sensitivity and escapism. Not everyone is going to want to sit down and come up with a fully fleshed-out alien culture in order to knock out a fanfic. Not everyone should have to. But in general, I think the stories with fleshed-out and multi-faceted cultures are much stronger and much more enjoyable than stories in which it's Team Good Guy vs. the Spear-Throwers or the Pegasus Galaxy Neo-Nazis.
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Anyway, though, I do see what you're saying, because even if you're not going for "moral quagmire", you're almost bound to end up with one at the end unless you dehumanize the bad guys (which is a quagmire of a different sort).
Yes! Exactly! That's exactly it. One of the biggest problem is that this isn't something intentional, in most cases. It's just there - antagonists going unpunished at the end of the story can leave things uncomfortably open-ended. But if you go into revenge, your supposedly good guys might end up... dark side, for lack of a better expression. It's tricky, it really is.
It's probably yet another moral cop-out, but it's one that works pretty well, I think.
Maybe - I wouldn't call it a cop-out, though. Unless you're setting out to write a piece of "dealing with problems" fiction, what you describe sounds like a great way to balance the need for justice with the good guys' morality. (Actually, it's such an excellent trick that I'm making a note to remember, for future reference...!)
One of the reasons I think that works so well is that it means you're making the "bad guys" into individuals, with motivations and personality of their own. There's often a generic mass of goons or natives or random evil people - making them all more than that is a good thing! And conflict is what happens when you've got several people with wills of their own interacting. Also, it is something you see in reality - to take a really famous, really obvious historic example, there were people in Hitler's own staff who tried to kill him. So. Just because you're wearing the same uniform or supposedly following the same ideals doesn't mean that you absolutely have to be brainwashed to follow these ideals or people into anything.
Um. So, basically - doing the "conflict within a group" does give much more depth than just ignoring the whole question of motivation and such?
I hadn't really thought about this, but ... you're right! It's really ironic that the show itself deals with indigenous people more respectfully than most of fandom does. Ouch!
Maybe they just make the indigenous people less aggressive than fandom does...? I so hesitate to use the word "respectful" when it comes to the SGA writers' dealing with the people of Pegasus. But. Um. Yeah - other than the Bola Kai, they've never used the people of a random planet as out-and-out antagonists, I don't think?
I don't know if that's better or worse than having done it in ignorance...
I really couldn't answer that, but if it's any consolation, my main memory of that fic is the KILLER ROBOT. Because - yeah. Killer robot.
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Because it's easy and comfortable and convenient and occasionally really funny. It's a handy plot device. I mean, I totally understand why you'd go with that kind of idea. Especially since it's so prevalent in fic, you start thinking that this is what people in Pegasus do. But. Yes. It can get very uncomfortable very fast, that kind of thing...
(is there a SINGLE people anywhere on Earth whose greeting rituals involve sex? c'mon!)
XD! No. But we (the Western world) have a long, long history of wishing that those exotic Others would have that sort of greeting rituals. And also of (possibly willfully?) misinterpreting local customs. The closest thing to sex I can think of right now is those cultures where it's common to kiss people (on the cheek or on the mouth) as a part of a greeting/farewell. Hmm. Sex is usually kept much more private, all around the world, in all kinds of cultures... Ack! Now I'm thinking seriously about a standard fic trope that's not meant to be taken seriously at all. There's a reason those fics are often listed as "PWP", and that reason is not that one should analyze them for plot! *g*
But in general, I think the stories with fleshed-out and multi-faceted cultures are much stronger and much more enjoyable than stories in which it's Team Good Guy vs. the Spear-Throwers or the Pegasus Galaxy Neo-Nazis.
YES. I agree to everything you said in your last paragraph, but especially this. This is what it's all about - it's not only that ignoring issues and making "natives" stupid and violent and irrational can come across as skeezy. It's that putting a little more depth into a story than that is what makes it interesting.
To take another example from the show - Kolya was an awesome bad guy because he had motives that really made sense the first time around; we will not talk about Irresponsible. It's not difficult to get where he's coming from - where all of the Genii are coming from. Then his son ended up dying by John's hand, and all of a sudden, there's a whole other layer of motivation. One that makes it easy to understand and believe that he would go after John and his friends like he did.
A fleshed-out antagonist can make a huge difference to a story - any story! This goes for movies and books and everything, and not just fic.
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